Azure – Application Insights – Configuration & Usage

I still remember the good old days where we had a huge instrumentation database wherein developers would log all the data – URLs, user navigation path, query parameters, exceptions, browser information, region information, etc to help in debugging the issues and generating required reports. Application Insights offers all these capabilities and much more with simple configuration and ready to use detailed reports.

This post is divided into two parts –

a.      Installation & configuration

b.      Usage of the reports 

Installation & configuration –

Prerequisites

·        Visual Studio 2013 or later version(s)

·        Subscription to Microsoft Azure

Visual Studio Application Insights has Free, Standard & Premium pricing tiers. 

             1.      Login to Azure portal and create a new Application Insight resource by selecting ASP.Net Web Application

2.      Make a note of the Instrumentation key

            

            Note: Intentionally erased the details 

These first two steps creates a resource and now it is ready for any application to be configured for monitoring.

3.      Install the SDK 

a.      Right click on your Project and install ApplicationInsights NuGet package

b.      Search for Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Web and install

               

Note: If “Application Insights for Visual Studio” extension is installed, then on right click of the project you will see an option “Add Application Insights” which is another way of configuring Application Insights.

c.      ApplicationInsights.config file will be added by the NuGet installation. Edit this file and add the below tag just before the file end.

<InstrumentationKey>Your instrumentation key here</InstrumentationKey>

 Note: This above configuration in the ApplicationInsights.config will write the logistics from all the available environments. If the requirement is to configure different Application Insights for each environment then the best solution is to configure the Instrumentation Key in Cloud.config and write the below statement in Global.asax.cs to fetch the key based on environment.

Microsoft.ApplicationInsights.Extensibility.TelemetryConfiguration.Active.InstrumentationKey = CloudConfigurationManager.GetSetting("InstrumentKeyName");

At this point we are done with the installation & configuration. Running the project (debug mode/release mode/published code) will start writing the logs.

 Usage of the reports –

          1.      Login to Azure portal and browse to Applications Insight.

 

2.      Click through the applications and then through the available reports to see more details.

Various reports are already created based on the ApplicationInsights data log –

·        Failures

This reports all the failures with exception details happened in last 24 hours along with giving additional details about the % of each exception against the total number of exceptions logged.

One great thing about this report –

It digs down from the URL to method name to operating system to even browser version for a generated exception. This is like a whole universe of data points for debugging the issue. This detailed information has helped our team more than once to find the root cause sooner.  

·        Performance

Gives performance number against each URL which will help in determining the low performance pages.

·        Browser

Gives the details about the browser & their versions used to access the application.

This post will not get into the details of each of the report. I request the readers to explore other reports & options.

Add Client side monitoring (Web browsers)

               The SDK installed from NuGet sends the monitoring data from server side code. To add monitoring on client side for web browsers,  

a.      Download the Javascript snippet from Azure portal and put it in every page or the Master Page.

The code snippet will have the Instrumentation Key. 

Please leave your feedback and queries in the comments section. Thank you!